TO A. L. SHEINMAN

Written:Written on February 28, 1922Published:First published in 1949 in the journalBolshevikNo. 1.

      Printed from the original.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1971,

      Moscow,Volume 36,

      pages567-568.Translated:Andrew RothsteinTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive.You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

February 28

ComradeSheinman,

Yourwords that the State Bank is now a “powerful
apparatus” (Feb. 22) made me laugh. Let me say in confidence:
this is the height of childishness, the height of
Communist-mandarin childishness.

A“powerful apparatus”! The “powerful apparatus”=
transferring from one state pocket into another such
remarkable “real values” as Soviet rubles.... Current accounts
expressed in gold rubles (and even that falsely, not at therealparity) 2.8–7.9–10.3 million rubles (on Dec. 16, Jan. 
16, and Feb. 1). Ha-ha! And how are they made up? 90–98
per cent are revenues from ourstate trusts, i.e., the same
official bits of paper from the same bureaucrats!

Atpresent the State Bank=a bureaucratic paper game.
There is the truth for you, if you want to hear not the sweet
communist-official lies (with which everyone feeds you
as a high mandarin), but thetruth.

Andif you don’t want to look at this truth with open
eyes, through all the communist lying, you are a man who
hasperishedin the prime of life in a swamp of official lying.
Now that is an unpleasant truth, but it is the truth.

Eitherto seek andgraduallyto find (testing and checking
one hundred times)peoplecapable of organising trade on
behalf of the State Bank, checking on trade, encouraging
business-like traders,closing downallegedly commercial,
but in reality communist-bureaucratic trading and factory
“Potemkin
villages”[1]—or the entire State Bank and all
its work is zero, worse than zero, self-deception with a new
bureaucratic rattle.

Anduntil you prove to me by acts, backed up by
experience, that the State Bank hasbegun to findsuch men,
inspectors, agents, etc., until then there is nothing to talk
about: I won’t believe a word you say.

Pleasedon’t be angry for this frankness.

Yours,Lenin

[1]Potemkinvillages—an early 19th-century expression denoting
window-dressing. During a tour of the south of Russia by the
Empress Catherine II in 1787, the Governor-General of the
Yekaterinoslav Vicegerency, G. A. Potemkin, gave her the
impression of exceptional welfare among the population by
stage-mounting various decorative villages, arches, parks, etc.